The
essence of the serial killer has been a perpetual fascination
to society as far back as history is written, when warriors
were immortalized for slaughtering thousands of people in
bloody battles and outlaws like Jesse James were placed
on pedestals every time their bullets pierced another innocent
bystander. Little has changed with the passing of time;
in fact, thanks to the unremitting involvement of our mass
media, their accessibility is almost as extensive as that
of someone like a super-model or a politician. Think I’m
exaggerating? Then consider this for a moment: how come
some television viewers of the late 60s/early 70s have admitted
that, at the time, they could barely tell the difference
between Jim Morisson and Charles Manson?

“Collectors”
is a movie about a select group of individuals whose fascinations
with celebrated mass murderers are taken to perhaps the
grittiest depths: depths that even those of us who show
slight interest have difficulty in understanding. Day by
day, they make a hobby out of collecting, selling and displaying
paintings and sketches done by the killers themselves, giving
them the kind of exposure that victims’ rights activists
and individuals associated with the murders find simply
nauseating. These aren’t the types of people, however, who
show interest in the artworks simply because of their texture;
in their eyes (at least most of the time), the portraits
mimic the artist’s accounts on life and death. Both of the
main characters seem to really understand who and what they’re
dealing with.

The
movie’s lead focus is an art dealer named Rick Stanton,
whose own attraction to the world of a serial killer’s art
may have been casually stimulated by his profession as a
Funeral Director. With the privilege of being allowed to
show up at all sorts of crime scenes during his career,
Stanton understands the extents to which these homicidal
maniacs operate (so to speak), and has made a name for himself
amongst art buffs by dealing with the killers themselves
and collecting their works for art shows, auctions, or even
personal use. In the documentation, we not only see Stanton’s
collection (which includes works ranging from Ottis Toole
and Charles Manson), but even get eyefuls of him posing
in the same photos with infamous killer John Wayne Gacy.
This, of course, is not a sick infatuation, Stanton assures
us; outside of the dealings of art work, he despises the
ruthless men just as much as any normal person would.

But
how does our society respond to his “hobby” (not to mention
the similar fascination of the movie’s other collectors)?
The movie paints its own portrait using interviews from
experts, the collectors themselves, and even family members
of serial killer victims as the brush strokes. There is
even an interview here with mass murderer Elmer Wayne Henley,
who, in the 1970s with two friends, abducted, raped and
brutally murdered 27 young men and then buried their remains.
Rick was the initial plug for which Henley could display
his portraits in art galleries across the nation, and not
surprisingly his sunflower painting is used in a few of
this movie’s promotional campaigns.

Henley
hopes that those who see his work will not judge it simply
based on his past, but other subjects of interview disagree
with that perception. One family member of a Henley victim,
for example, despises the support he gets in art shows,
and another expresses her bewilderment over how anyone can
appreciate anything painted by a person who took innocent
lives away from those they loved. Meanwhile, in other contexts,
Harold Schechter, the author of “The A to Z Encyclopedia
of Serial Killers” (which I browsed through prior to this
review), believes that these obsessions are derived from
the notion that people feel a “measure of protection” against
evil when owning these artworks. While I don’t exactly agree
with many of these theories, I am willing to believe that
some respectively do.

The
portraits themselves are, for the most part, quite compelling
to gaze at, be they either innocuous or extreme. Stanton
and his close friend, Tobias Allen (another collector),
have an especially enjoyable time in teasing us with the
works painted by John Wayne Gacy, whose Pogo the clown persona
is reflected through portraits that look completely harmless
(even his paintings of the seven dwarfs, which one individual
connects to Gacy’s style of luring young men for sex and
torture, look like they could sit up in any typical toy
store). A close friend was very surprised that even one
individual this twisted this could express himself in seemingly
innocent art, but it’s not really that big a surprise; after
all, Charles Manson was a talented recording artist for
a brief period of time before his conviction, correct?

Some
of the more earnest pieces carry the evident trademarks
of the artist’s twisted vendettas; the works of Richard
Ramirez, for example, echo the man’s obsessive link to Satanism
and mutilation, with some portraits even portraying the
brutal crimes he committed during the early 80s in southern
California. In once unforgettable scene, a sketch done by
Wayne Henley showing the nude backside of a young man unnerves
a protester of the art shows, and to keep other eyes from
viewing its objectionable content, he purchases the picture
for $600, removes it from the frame, tears it up, and then
sets it on fire in the middle of the street.

It
must have been difficult for director Julian P. Hobbs to
examine these people and their situations so thoroughly
without feeling the need to have his movie make its own
stance. The underlying structure is superbly developed on
these grounds, too, because it descends into its material
without any bias and presents it from all perspectives,
thereby allowing the audience to decide, on its own terms,
what side of the debate they fall under. The subject matter
probably could not be documented any other way successfully
because of the fragility of the issue; a picture that would
have attempted to lead everyone in the same direction, for
example, would seem naive to assume that everyone shares
the same experience on the events.

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